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Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

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Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#231

Post by astine »

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #181
cscotta wrote: post #7

The biggest issue I see with Oracle's lawsuit is not with Android itself, but the future of Java as an open platform. The claims are pretty serious, and Oracle is going straight for the jugular. It'll be interesting to see how it shakes out, but I've got to hope that Google will come out of this in good shape for the sake of Java. It's unfortunate that Oracle is interpreting Google's implementation of Dalvik and a Ja…

"It'll be interesting to see Oracle's stance toward other alternate JVMs such as IBM's." IBM could completely paralyze the entire computer industry with their portfolio. That they don't is a testament to how much money they earn in simply letting others do the "hard" PC stuff while they singularly engulf the big iron market. IBM was the only company that I know of that actually outlasted the US government in antitrus…

IBM's JVM is licensed. They had a legal agreement with Sun over it and I have no reason to believe that it won't carry over with Oracle.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#233

Post by napierzaza »

Confusion wrote: post #185
shasta wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle may claim that Google infringes on all those patents, but they'll never sue. Patents are just a nuclear deterrent. Edit: Wow, -7 and dropping. I guess I should have included a sarcasm symbol. Spoiler: My point was that patents do get used, and this argument about them just being for defense is nonsense.

A nuclear deterrent only works if both sides have nukes. Google is a pretty young company, with few patents. Oracle is a much older company, that bought many old companies along the way. Oracle's patent portfolio vastly outstrips that of Google.

Google has no patents? I doubt that.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#234

Post by napierzaza »

eli wrote: post #67
shasta wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle may claim that Google infringes on all those patents, but they'll never sue. Patents are just a nuclear deterrent. Edit: Wow, -7 and dropping. I guess I should have included a sarcasm symbol. Spoiler: My point was that patents do get used, and this argument about them just being for defense is nonsense.

Well, there would be no reason to build a defense in the first place if NOBODY ever went on the offense.

FYI there was never a global nuclear holocaust; but people still built nukes. In fact there was never direct fighting between the US and Russia...

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#235

Post by hga »

bad_user wrote: post #204
hga wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which could be rather bad if you need a JVM tuned in a non-standard way. Anyway you look at it, Oracle has enabled a lot of FUD to be thrown at Java, and if your observation is correct, andyone who's working on any sort of non-Oracle derived JVM (and there are a bunch ) had just been handed a lot of legal uncertainty. Side note: I don't need hearing this shortly after learning about the RightHaven atrocity factory.

> andyone who's working on any sort of non-Oracle derived JVM Except Dalvik is not derived from the JVM. Sure they use the language, but what, are you going to tell me that I can't make a compiler that translates JVM bytecode to something else? Should projects like http://ikvm.net be illegal? Oracle is destroying the biggest advantage Java has.

Very good point!

Dalvik very much isn't a JVM. While both are bytecode interpreters you need to translate Java bytecodes into Dalvik ones to use the former. I'll need to read more (just woke up) to see just what Oracle is objecting to.

Bytecode based systems are an old old old concept due to the severe lack of memory available in the bad old days, e.g. I personally know that as of the mid-late '70s the Lisp Machine's compiler went to a bytecode that the microcode would then interpret. As I recall Smalltalk did this and I know it wasn't a new concept. Heck, what about UCSD's Pascal system?

Don't know the history of JIT compilation, let alone various tricks that have recently been developed; Java is the second wildly successful bytecode system, I think, after UCSD's, which was done back when memory was a lot more precious.

And Dalvik optimized for among other things low memory demand, e.g. it is register based and Java bytecode is stack based.

Thanks for pointing this out.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#236

Post by tocomment »

tocomment wrote: post #218
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It'll be interesting to see Oracle's stance toward other alternate JVMs such as IBM's." IBM could completely paralyze the entire computer industry with their portfolio. That they don't is a testament to how much money they earn in simply letting others do the "hard" PC stuff while they singularly engulf the big iron market. IBM was the only company that I know of that actually outlasted the US government in antitrus…

That's interesting. I wonder if Google could buy IBM and then have them drop the lawsuit?

I wasn't trying to make a joke. I figured Google would have a very high market valuation compared to IBM. But my point still stands, why can't Google buy a company that owns some patents that Oracle is currently infringing on?

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#237

Post by Tichy »

wmf wrote: post #25
seldo wrote: post #6

Excuse the really really obvious question, but how can you sue somebody for intellectual property infringement on open-source software? Didn't you already give anybody the license to do what they wanted with it? If they've violated the license terms in some way, isn't that different from IP infringement?

It's important to understand that Android doesn't use Oracle's open-source OpenJDK. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses the necessary patents only for OpenJDK and not for alternate implementations such as Dalvik. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses patents only for JVMs that are TCK-compliant, which Dalvik isn't. An argument could be made that Oracle licenses patents for GPLed JVMs but not for A…

What if I take the open source OracleJVM and change every line, so that it become Dalvik? Wouldn't it still be derived from OracleJVM and hence covered? The approach would only be possible because Dalvik is open source, too, of course.

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#238

Post by contextfree »

statictype wrote: post #227
loup-vaillant wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like lambdas, you'd probably like F# better: lighter syntax, types are inferred, and it looks like it's quite well supported by Microsoft. But of course, if you consider F#, you may want to use the more free and open Ocaml.

F# has better library support (at least if you're on Windows). It also has monads.

It has monad syntax, but like C# it has no support for higher-kinded polymorphism (contextfree.livejournal.com) so unlike Haskell there's no way to create generic helper methods that work with every monad type.

(Not to discourage anyone from trying F#, which is a nice language anyway.)

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#239

Post by bugmenot »

jacquesm wrote: post #176
gojomo wrote: post #39

What an excellent occasion to try the homoglyph hoax attack on friends and enemies! (See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1571984 .) http://www.google.com/search?q=οraclе Your search - οraclе - did not match any documents.

It seems to be the o and the e at the end. Homoglyphs were a bad idea. Single letter or word homoglyphs in ohterwise latin text ought to be highlit somehow to warn against tricks like that.

I agree. Browsers really need a character whitelist (and also for other features like RTL and combining).

Re: Oracle sues Google over use of Java in Android

#240

Post by purple-people »

bad_user wrote: post #194
technomancy wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BSD license would be useless here. Preventing this kind of thing is the whole point of the third revision of the GPL; to my knowledge there are no other software licenses that do this.

No, GPLv3 is useless here. Oracle can sue for patents over any GPLv3 technology, and all GPLv3 says is that the company doing the suing can't distribute code under GPLv3. But since they own the copyrights of Java, they can always change its license and leave the rest of the world in dust.

Uhh, no.

They would be violating the GPLv3 license under which they distributed the source. Changing the license only affects the next person acquiring the source. The people who acquired it under the GPLv3 license cannot have this retroactively revoked or relicensed. If Orcale sued those parties, they would be violating the terms of the license. In the least instance they shouldn't have been distributing the source unde GPLv3 so their claim for infringement would be moot.

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